Abstract:
NIWA's (National Institute of Water and Atmospheric Research - New Zealand) MBIS (Marine Biodata Information System) database is a data warehouse of marine data that is used, among other things, to serve South West Pacific (including New Zealand) regional marine data to OBIS, and to serve the South West Pacific Regional OBIS Node data. The MBIS dataset is, and will continue to be a work in ... progress because new data are continually being added as they are discovered, provided, integrated or created.

MBIS currently contains data that are primarily the results of a series of research trawl surveys carried out as part of New Zealand's MFish (Ministry of Fisheries) data collection to support fisheries management within the NZ EEZ (New Zealand Exclusive Economic Zone), plus data from several decades of marine invertebrate research sampling in the NZ EEZ. MBIS also contains presence data for coralline algae around the New Zealand coast.

The South Western Pacific data accessible to OBIS via this RON will eventually cover an area from Antarctica to Fiji, and from the mid Tasman Sea to the mid-Pacific Ocean. Whether these are all served by MBIS or by other providers has yet to be determined.

Quality
The fish data (collected by NIWA for New Zealand's Ministry of Fisheries) is of a high quality, having been groomed many times for correctness, completeness, and for spatial outliers. Other data may not have been so rigorously groomed but are still of very reasonable quality.

Access Constraints
Data supplied to OBIS are freely accessible by the public. Most MBIS (Marine Biodata Information System) data are (or will be) freely available to the public, but some are commercially sensitive and may only be accessed by authorised personnel.

Use Constraints
Data users should acknowledge NIWA (National Institute for Water and Atmospheric Research Ltd - New Zealand), and where Fish data are used also acknowledge the New Zealand Ministry of Fisheries.

Acknowledge the use of specific records from contributing databases in the form ... appearing in the 'Citation' field thereof (if any); and acknowledge the use of the OBIS facility.

For information purposes, email to obissupport@marine.rutgers.edu the full citation of any publication made (printed or electronic) that cites OBIS or any constituent part.